Money is always a nice thing, but alas, I have very little of it, and get very little each month. I miss the day where I could go buy a new PC each month if I wanted to paid for in cash. (The days of $1,500 and $2,000 dollar PC's)
I remember paying $200.00 for an old Voodoo 1 video card by now defunct 3dFX. It had 8 megs of ram on it and it was coooooooool.
It makes me sick to see all of the inovation going into the industry and knowning that I have no part in it.
I am so sad when I think that I paid $1,800 for an Acer p75, 850 meg, 4 meg ram, PC only 9 years ago. My Last PC, the HP that I am now using, cost less than $500.00 and is 500% better.
Kinda makes you wonder now what else can be invented. The "discovery" phase of Computers and Computer gaming is long gone. We are now well into the copy everything that has been done before and try to make little improvements to it in order to rack in the cash.
Inovation and imagination no longer play a part in compter gaming design. Most of the games I have seen in the Last three to four years have been bleak shadows of games that have come before them. Excluding the very few original ideas.
In Computers we have only seen smaller and faster, cheaper, and weaker products. Reliability has dropped 10 fold, as has cost, while the market has stalled and profits plumitted.
Sure cheaper is always better, but at what cost? 200 gigabyte Hard Drives that cost the same as a 1 gigabyte Hard Drive did 5 years ago fail six months after purchase while that 1 gigabyte Hard Drive is still running.
Memory that cost less than a quarter per meg often fails in a fraction of the time that memory of two or three years ago did.
From motherBoards to modems, everything is cheaper, both in cost and in reliability. With no new inovations on the horizions say for the More's (sp) law, and the onset of DVD burners, we really have nothing to look forward to.
I know, I know, smaller, better, faster, cheaper, and such is the way of the future, but that road is now being paved by those who have already forked over tens of thousands of dollars already, and how much more are they going to be willing to lay down on the super highway of tomorrow?
The world has grown much smaller in the Last nine years, a whole hell of a lot smaller. How much small will it become in the next nine or ten years? I can see a day when things are so restricted, freedom is no longer free, and people cover nearly ever squar inch of what was once pristeen open land for as far as the eye can see. Where we all live and die without ever knowning our own names, just our number, and free thought and inovation is something that we dare not think of for fear that the big corperations will read out minds and exterminate us before we pose a threat. Where children are enginered and you must have permission to have a child. Where only the super rich can drive cars and leave the cities without passes. A place where you are nothing but a renewable resource that is both expendable and undervalued. Where freedom is measured in how much you are capable of paying for.